Fox Chief Compares Josh Boone’s NEW MUTANTS To THE SHINING, Of All Things

Our friends over at Dark Horizons have a new quote from 20th Century Fox chief Stacey Snider regarding Josh Boone's forthcoming The New Mutants movie. Let's get right to it:

“If we’re going to make a superhero movie, we have to ask ourselves: ‘What’s our version? What’s a Fox Marvel film? When you look at films like Deadpool or Logan or the upcoming New Mutants, you’ll see they have their own personality. Great effort has been put into making sure they’re differentiated.

New Mutants is about these teenagers who are just coming into their powers. It’s like watching mutants go through adolescence and they have no impulse control, so they’re dangerous.

The only solution is to put them in a Breakfast Club detention/Cuckoo’s Nest institutional setting. It protects the people on the outside, but it’s strange and combustible inside. The genre is like a haunted-house movie with a bunch of hormonal teenagers. We haven’t seen it as a superhero movie whose genre is more like The Shining than ‘we’re teenagers let’s save the world.'”

Alright, so, a lot to unpack here. Let's go through it a step a time.

First of all, Snider's right about Deadpool and Logan both having very particular flavors, flavors we haven't seen in the MCU (one might argue that the X-Men films, which were also Fox superhero movies, have also trafficked in a flavor that's been largely absent from the MCU: aggressively mediocre), and it's hard to argue with the successful results they've seen with both of those projects. If New Mutants is cut from that same atypical cloth, that'll be great!

Secondly, it's interesting to see the various films Snider namechecks while trying to nail down New Mutants' tone: The Breakfast Club and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest both get a shout-out, as well as Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. It's hard to imagine a teen superhero film at the nexus of those three films - namedropping The Shining is really throwing us for a loop - but we're damn curious to see what this looks like in practice.

What do you folks think? Like what you're hearing so far?

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Scott Wampler is an online film blogger, Podcast host, and man of constant sorrow living in Austin, TX. His likes include CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, the filmography of David Lynch, and the conspicuous consumption of alcohol. Dislikes include people and unfrosted Pop-Tarts.